Space Physics Seminar winter-2015

An emerging Grand Challenge in space and astrophysics is to understand the energy dissipation processes in turbulent systems, from the solar wind to black hole accretion disks. Inspired by new exciting observations, new theoretical ideas, and new computational capabilities, more and more researchers draw their attention to this key problem. While the large-scale dynamics of turbulent plasmas is often well captured by magneto-hydrodynamics, small-scale dissipation processes like plasma heating or particle acceleration via turbulent reconnection call for a kinetic treatment. In this talk I will describe recent progress in the areas of gyrokinetic, hybrid, and fully kinetic theoretical studies of turbulent energy dissipation. One can expect that in the next years, we will see transformative changes in this exciting area of physics.